Month: August 2012

On a match box: “Strike Anywhere”.

Kobun’s literal translation of the elements in the word shikantaza strings together as: “pure hit sit”.

Here’s one from “Zen Letters, Teachings of Yuanwu”:

If you want to pass through easily and directly right now, just let your body and mind become thoroughly empty, so it is vacant and silent yet aware and luminous. Inwardly, forget all your conceptions of self, and outwardly, cut off all sensory defilements. When inside and outside are clear all the way through, there is just one true reality. Then eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and conceptual mind, form, sound, smell, flavor, touch, and conceptualized phenomena–all of these are established based on that one reality.

(trans. Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary, pg 86).

Similarly, here’s one from the Pali Canon, attributed to Gautama the Buddha:

…making self-surrender (one’s) object of thought, (one) lays hold of concentration, lays hold of one-pointedness of mind.

(SN V 200, Pali Text Society V 176)

What is “one-pointedness of mind”?- here’s Yuanwu again:

Once you have been directed by a teacher or else discovered on your own the originally inherently complete real mind, then no matter what situations or circumstances you encounter, you know for yourself where it’s really at.

(Zen Letters pg 48)

“…where it’s really at”, as in:

Be aware of where you really are twenty-four hours a day. You must be most attentive.

(Ibid, pg 53)

When the impact of consciousness opens the ability to feel, and what is felt enters into the place of occurrence of consciousness, then the mind remains waking up or falling asleep even as the place of occurrence of consciousness shifts. Single-pointedness of mind is just consciousness where it occurs, as it occurs.

On a matchbox, “Strike Anywhere”.

Be like a person who has ‘died the great death’; after your breath is cut off, then you come back to life.

(“Zen Letters- Teachings of Yuanwu”, trans. Cleary brothers pg 84)

I have this experience often when I sit (my breath is “cut off”), particularly in the transition from exhalation to inhalation, and the focus of attention on the movement of breath itself doesn’t necessarily help. The focus of attention on where I am, excluding nothing, seems to help.

Fundamentally, this great light is there with each and every person right where they stand— empty clear through, spiritually aware, all-pervasive, it is called ‘the scenery of the fundamental ground’.

(Ibid, pg 85- italics added)

I only mean that right at the moment where my exhalation turns to inhalation (and to a lessor degree where inhalation turns to exhalation), observing the activity without altering the activity requires that I be waking up or falling asleep to it- that is to say, in a state where I am observing the action but the normal linkage to conscious motor response is not in effect. This is tricky, because the loss of conscious control in waking up or in falling asleep can result in a hypnic jerk.

What I have found is that close attendance to my sense of location in space and allowing that location to shift sponteneously (“dropping body and mind”?) is conducive to waking up or falling asleep.

That’s what I mean.